"How long have you been training?"
She observes me for a hard minute.
Her green eyes perform the assessment that I am learning is her default processing mode when confronted with a question that requires her to decide how much truth to release. The evaluation is thorough. Granular. The kind of visual interrogation that reads micro-expressions and body language and the chemical composition of my scent for indicators of trustworthiness.
I let her look. Hold still under the inspection the way I hold still in the crease when a shooter is reading my positioning. Giving nothing away. Offering nothing but presence.
I smirk. Lean in closer, reducing the distance between our faces to a measurement that makes the cold arena air between us feel tropical.
"Giving me the silent treatment now?"
She exhales through her nose.
"My whole life." The answer is quiet, stripped of the bravado that typically armors her speech. "My dad is a coach, same as yours. I've been on the ice since I was six. He trained me personally until my mother decided that hockey was not an appropriate pursuit for an Omega daughter and started sabotaging my access to rinks and teams and coaching time. So I trained myself. Community centers. Public sessions. Whateverice I could find that didn't require my mother's signature or my mother's approval."
I nod slowly, processing the biography compressed into six sentences. A lifetime of grinding. A parent who believed. A parent who didn't. And an athlete who persisted despite the one person who should have been her biggest supporter dedicating significant resources to her failure.
"Why aren't you on a professional team?" The question exits before my editorial filter engages, and I let it fly because the answer matters more than the diplomacy of the asking. "You could lead a roster swiftly. Probably be a strong captain, even."
She stares into my eyes.
The look holds for long enough that I can count three separate emotions cycling through the green: hope, then bitterness, then the resigned acceptance of someone who has delivered this explanation so many times the words have worn smooth like river stones.
"No team will take me because I'm an Omega."
She huffs, the sound carrying the compressed frustration of a decade of identical outcomes.
"I've been rejected more times than I can show on my fingers twice fold, and nothing has changed. Every tryout. Every scout. Every league. They watch me play, they tell me I'm talented, and they send me home because the biology printed on my ID matters more than anything I accomplish between the boards." She grumbles, her jaw tightening with the residual anger that lives in the connective tissue between her words. "I thought I could take a shot here. But I'm overhearing that the requirements need the Omega to have a pack, and obviously the entire team is going to be Alpha-dominant, so that isn't going to work."
I look at her.
Long and hard and with a focus that has nothing to do with her nipples or her scent or the persistent, low-grade arousal that her proximity generates in my nervous system. I look at her the way I look at a play that does not make sense until you shift the angle of observation, the way I study film when a team's strategy appears flawed until you realize the flaw is the strategy.
Pack requirement. Alpha-dominant roster. Omega excluded by structural design rather than talent evaluation.
The same system that kept her off every other team, replicated at an institution that claims to be dismantling it.
She sighs, the sound deflating her posture by several inches.
"Let me get your damn stuff to the locker room so I can deal with the skate of shame."
I nod slowly, following her off the ice.
We strip our skates in silence at the bench, the quiet weighted with the specific gravity of a conversation that landed harder than either of us intended. She yanks the laces of her sneakers with the aggressive efficiency of a woman who channels emotion into motor function, each tug carrying the frustrated energy of words she is finished saying.
She reaches for my gear bag.
Lifts it approximately three inches off the bench before her arms register the weight and her face registers the objection.
"What the fuck are you carrying?!" Her biceps strain against the bag's mass, the veins along her forearms surfacing as she attempts to complete the lift. "Every piece of gym equipment ever manufactured?! Is there a squat rack in here?!"
I smirk, reaching past her to lift the bag from her struggling grip with one hand.
"My daily workout of shit. I'll carry this part."
She frowns, the expression caught between indignation and relief.
"I have to carry your stuff. For the bet. A deal is a deal."
